Re: New translation: 使用<select>鏈結到本地化內容

Thanks, Richard, for pointing out this resource.

I also would like to make a few comments using the English source
document as a reference:

> *Fonts* You must also think about whether the reader will have fonts to display this range of scripts.
> Be aware that a Web user in France, for example, may see empty boxes in place of the Japanese
> text while a user in Japan will see the text just fine. This is because the fonts available on the
> French user's system may not contain Japanese glyphs. One could argue that this is not too
> important, since French users don't need to be able to read the Japanese. On the other hand,
> you may feel that empty boxes are unsightly.

One can also argue with equal if not greater force that undoubtedly
there are plenty of Japanese (or any other nationality) business
people travelling through the major cities of France every single day
who would be pleased if multi-lingual web sites localized in their
native language were accessible on French computers in the offices and
hotels where they need to meet and work with people.

Operating system vendors and large multi-national organizations should
think about this more : This kind of scenario suggests that a basic
selection of fonts covering all of the world's major scripts should be
installed by default on workstations in the offices and business
centers of multi-national and travel-related organizations.  Empty
square boxes are indeed unsightly.

> *Ordering* There is also the question of how to order a multilingual list of language or country names.
> It is not an issue that is specific to selection lists, and there is no simple answer to this.
>
> It is difficult to apply alphabetic ordering since this varies by language, and there are also likely to
> be multiple scripts involved. It would be possible to follow the default order prescribed by the
> Unicode Collation Algorithm, but whether that would be helpful, intuitive or recognizable to the
> user is another question.
>
> Other possibilities are to order the list by the size of your market, the size of the region or number
> of speakers of a language, or by some kind of geographical principle. Again, while these may
> provide a rationale for ordering, none of these approaches are necessarily helpful to the user -
> especially for long lists.

I've been thinking a lot recently about web site localization issues,
including this very issue.  Here is a solution I am considering
implementing:  It is now quite easy to use Geolocation to get an
approximate fix on the geographic origin of the computer requesting a
web page.  Based on the country of origin determined from geolocation,
it would be possible to use a lookup table to map the "top" languages
used in that country.
The <select> list could then be reordered so that the top 4 or 5 most
commonly-encountered languages of a given country of origin appeared
at the top of the list.

One additional point is to always include English somewhere near the
top of the list too, since it is the de-facto international language
of business almost everywhere in the world now.

Implementing this, users in Vietnam might then see the following at
the top of their select list:

     * Vietnamese
     * French
     * English
     * Chinese
     * Khmer
     --------------
     ... all the rest ...

While users in Finland might instead see the following ordering:

     * Finnish
     * Swedish
     * Sami
     * Russian
     * English
     -----------------
     ... all the rest ...

I'd be very interested in people's thoughts on this idea of using
geolocation to derive a short-list of languages.

Note that there are a number of subtle points one can consider.  What
do I really mean by my phrase "most commonly encountered languages"?
We may need to ask, "encountered in what context?"

For example, in many countries of the world, the languages most
frequently encountered in trade and business are going to be mainly
the languages of colonialism and empire, to which we may now add
modern global trade.  These "top" languages may differ substantially
from those spoken in the local markets and on the street ...

- Ed Trager



2009/4/30 Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>:
> http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-navigation-select.zh-hant.php
>
> Thanks to Samuel Chong the FAQ-based article "Using <select> to Link to Localized Content" has now been translated into Traditional Chinese. This is our first translation into Traditional Chinese.
>
>
> ============
> Richard Ishida
> Internationalization Lead
> W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
>
> http://www.w3.org/International/
> http://rishida.net/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 30 April 2009 14:46:36 UTC